Chinese Boats, Qi Lu, and Competing With Google—A Bing Roundup

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Although Microsoft made the official announcement about its new search engine Bing last week, the site won’t be fully functional until this Wednesday. Here are some tidbits about Bing collected from the Web to tide you over until then.

—In his early test drive of Bing, The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley concluded that the upstart search engine won’t replace Google. However, he did say that the video searching and travel price prediction capabilities will give the big G a run for its money.

—On a more historical note, CNET’s Ina Fried wrote the story of the development of Bing, why search matters, and why one of the major developers built a boat in China. Nautical pursuits aside, the most important nugget of information may be that Bing is meant to continue to develop and grow—by adding more information to the search results, for instance—after Wednesday.

—Qi Lu, Microsoft’s head of online services (who came over from Yahoo in January), gave a rare interview to Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek that conveyed a similar idea. He described Bing as just a small part of a long journey. Lu also said he expects other competitors to arise, which will ultimately benefit end-users of search technologies.

My favorite bit of Bing-ology? Typing “Bing” into Google brings up “Bing Surfboards” directly below the listing for the new search engine.